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s a rule, wealthy collectors own the Duesenbergs, Ferraris, Cobras and COPO Camaros, while middle-class folks like us own Mustangs,
Chevelles, Model As and MGBs. It’s always been like that, but as one memo- rable seventh-grade teacher insisted: “A rule is not a rule unless there’s an excep- tion.” Those exceptions do happen, and once in a while ordinary people with jobs and mortgages and car payments and tuition bills end up with extraordi- nary automobiles by being smart, lucky, foolhardy or all three.
COBRA DREAMS “I remember seeing a Cobra in a maga-
zine in the early 1960s, and that’s the car I always wanted,” says retired airline pilot Hugh Guynes. “The first time I had a chance to buy one was in 1974. The price was $8,000, and I was making $12,000 as an Air Force lieutenant. I didn’t buy it, because it was green.”
A year later, he saw a silver 289 in Day- ton, Ohio. When that car hit the market, he’d just bought a new Corvette and had to pass again. Finally, in 1992, Guynes saw that same Cobra at a Shelby meet. When he told his wife, “Shaun’s car is for sale,” she was less than thrilled. Guynes, though, rationalized the purchase, which cost “about my annual salary," by telling her, “this car will never be less than what it is worth now.” Still not impressed, his wife countered: “This is an awful lot of money. Why are we spending this?” The good news, says Guynes, was that although the owner required a substan- tial down payment, “he wanted me to finance the Cobra with him.”
Guynes loves the Cobra. “It has never even been bumped. When I stripped the paint, it didn’t even have a door ding. It’s the original body, engine and transmis- sion.” Ultimately, Guynes opted for a full restoration and a repaint in its original Guardsman Blue.
He has no plans to sell the car — now worth at least $600K — and instead will
Hugh Guynes had to convince his wife that a Cobra (this page) was worth a year’s salary. In hindsight, Bill Tower’s purchase of his Grand Sport (opposite) was inspired.
1965 SHELBY 289 COBRA
leave it to his son. He readily admits that he couldn’t possibly buy this car now, and that he “couldn’t afford half the price.”
Guynes drives the Cobra often, and he even drives it hard. “Six weeks after I finished the car, I took it to the drag strip, which most people, including the judges at Cincinnati’s Ault Park Concours, find unfathomable.“
MODERN ART Don Murphy lives in an attractive
older subdivision in Maryland. There is no indication that the tiny Italian
car in his garage may be the single most important production Cisitalia 202 coupe. Now worth upwards of $300K, this very car was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s ground- breaking “8 Automobiles Exhibit” of 1951, which effectively acknowledged automobiles as fine art. Although he delivers new trucks occasionally, when the retired Detroit Diesel veteran bought his 1947 Cisitalia in 1967, he was a service manager making well under $200 a week.
Murphy had known the Cisitalia since his high school days, but he’d lost touch with it, until he saw its forlorn
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